The Polish Experience of the Anatomy of Empires

This review was prepared as part of the joint “Book Review” project of the Political Sphere Institute and the Center for European Studies in Minsk.

Nowak, Andrzej (2008). History and Geopolitics. A Contest for Eastern Europe. Warsaw: PISM, 363 pp.

Review prepared by Aliaksandr Paharely.

Professor Andrzej Nowak is well known in Poland and beyond as a conservative historian, head of the Laboratory for the History of Russia and the USSR at the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, editor of the Kraków bimonthly “Arcana,” and lecturer at universities in Kraków, Harvard, and Tokyo. The collection of essays presented to readers, thirteen in all, consists mainly of articles, book chapters, presentations, and conference papers from 2003-2007, gathered under one cover for the first time. It was published by the Polish Institute of International Affairs in English translation from French and Polish.

Some parts of the book echo Nowak’s work “Histories of Political Traditions: Piłsudski, Putin and Others” (Nowak, 2007). Although the essays address different topics, they are united by reflection on why history remains at the center of attention for politicians and intellectuals, and on their uses and abuses of history to justify a particular ideological paradigm or foreign policy concept. It was precisely these tendencies of the first decade of the twenty-first century that Marek Cichocki, adviser to President Lech Kaczyński, called “historical policy.”

The context for these reflections is a historical conflict which, according to the author, has unfolded in Eastern Europe with Russia’s participation since the fifteenth century or even earlier. The author defines the geographical location of Eastern Europe as “east of the West, that is, the territories inhabited by Germans…, north-east of the South (the Balkans and the territories of Islamic influence on the European continent), south-east of the North (Scandinavia)…”.

As Andrzej Nowak admits, the geopolitical dimension of the rivalry among various actors for control over this part of Europe, against the background of growing interest in this aspect in contemporary historiography, contributed to the emergence of the essays in the book.

This highly interesting collection can hardly be qualified as yet another example of a “subjective Polish view” of Russia and its policy. Such a conclusion would be mistaken. The essays that make up the book do not in any way construct an image of Russia as an “eternal empire”; on the contrary, they ask how and why various participants in the rivalry for Eastern Europe found the idea of empire attractive at different stages of history.

Nowak carefully examines the historical and ideological context of why, in Russia in the past and in the present, the idea of empire has found many supporters. Expressions in the book such as “Britain had an empire, while Russia is an empire” should, however, be understood rather as an intellectual provocation inviting discussion. Nowak’s method may be described as a kind of archaeology of imperial discourse, although he himself would object to such a definition.

He describes Foucault’s category of discourse in his book as nothing less than a manifestation of an “intellectual epidemic,” just as he critically comments on other tendencies in the social sciences as “intellectual fashions.” The Polish historian himself defines his method as “anatomy.”

Whether he is studying the renewed interest in Danilevsky’s views and, in connection with this, the reception of Huntington’s theory in Russia at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; examining the post-Soviet apology for totalitarianism; or analyzing changes in Lenin’s strategy on the Polish question in 1918-1920, Andrzej Nowak consistently maintains a balanced approach to the material under consideration.

The Kraków historian also pauses on the “subjective Polish view of Russia” mentioned above. The example of the “Sovietologists” Leopold Łabędź, Richard Pipes, and Adam Ulam, Jews from affluent middle-class families whose education and upbringing took place during the interwar Polish state and who learned from their own fate what the joint expansion of the Soviet and Nazi empires in 1939 meant, calls this stereotype into question.

One of the most interesting essays for Belarusian readers will be the one entitled “Was the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth an Empire?”. The answer to this question certainly depends on the methodological and ideological assumptions of the person asking it. If the Commonwealth was an empire, then, looking back at its history and the history of its component parts, it was an unwilling and at times involuntary one.

The possibility of excessive territorial expansion by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and its likely ideological and material consequences in the event of a collision with the Novgorod Republic in the 1470s under Casimir Jagiellon illustrates this view of the problem. In 1922 Stalin described interwar Poland as one of the contemporary “empires,” which was undoubtedly one means of demonizing that state. At the same time, however, Nowak does not critically examine the views and assessments of the interwar Polish state that can be found in the works of non-Soviet Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Lithuanian historians.

Attention should also be paid to Nowak’s comparison of concepts of patriotism on the eve of the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, above all its republican and independence-oriented models. According to the Polish historian, the research perspective on the former has received a new impetus because of the possibilities opened up by reassessing the traditions of republicanism as an alternative to, and predecessor of, liberalism. Such a model does not place the state and loyalty to it among the imperative duties of the citizen. Given the exclusive character of noble democracy, the new model of patriotism, the independence-oriented or Enlightenment model, was more closely connected with the idea of the sovereignty and independence of the state itself and was more inclusive. This was embodied in the Constitution of 3 May 1791 and the debates surrounding it during the Four-Year Sejm (1788-1792).

The novelty of the Enlightenment independence model of patriotism should not, however, lead us to think that the republican model unequivocally doomed the Commonwealth to partition and therefore deserves no attention. Nowak believes that, in the case of the Commonwealth, this model should be viewed from the standpoint of the contradiction between citizens’ rights and the powers of central government. Without this, such patriotism is deprived of its legitimacy. During the partitions, however, this aspect receded into the background, and supporters of republicanism became traitors in the eyes of the defenders of independence patriotism, who gradually gained increasing influence over politics and public opinion. The third model of Polish patriotism, associated with organic work and traditionally linked to positivism in the second half of the nineteenth century, appeared already in the mid-eighteenth century.

The Kraków historian characterizes the ideological background of the rhetoric of Russian foreign policy in the early twenty-first century as a combination of “enlightened imperialism” with the Schmittian “friend-enemy” approach. The idea of empire is also connected with the messianism of the Russian, and more broadly post-Soviet, intelligentsia. Nowak reproached the Polish public for underestimating the subjective feeling of humiliation among the Russian and post-Soviet intelligentsia.

We may add that a complex of “wounded feelings” is also characteristic of part of the Polish intelligentsia, expressed in ressentiment, something to which the liberal Polish historian Jerzy Jedlicki (Jedlicki, 1988) and Liah Greenfeld (Greenfeld, 1992) drew attention in different contexts.

Nowak also touches on the professional ethics of historians who, in the post-Cold War era, participate in ideological battles. The example of scholars such as Natalia Narochnitskaya, an apologist for Stalinism in contemporary Russia, demonstrates how this can undermine the authority of, and trust in, the historical profession. This happens when a historian makes a conscious choice and becomes a kind of soldier of historical policy. Although, as Nowak notes, in this situation there is also a peculiar “family tradition”: Narochnitskaya’s father faithfully served Stalin and wrote historical panegyrics for him.

It is difficult to reproach the publication for errors. Nevertheless, since several different translators worked on the texts, they did not always coordinate the translation of particular titles. This happened in the case of Józef Pawlikowski’s treatise “Can the Poles Win Independence?”, which is rendered in several different versions in different parts of the book.

In studying the contemporary history and politics of Russia, Poland, and Eastern Europe more generally, as well as historical policy in our region, ignoring this book and Professor Andrzej Nowak’s other publications would be an unforgivable mistake. As for empires, in the near future they will remain the subject of heated debates in different parts of Eastern Europe.

Literature mentioned in the review

1. Andrzej Nowak (2007). Historie politycznych tradycji. Piłsudski, Putin i inni. Kraków:  “Arcana”.

2. Jerzy Jedlicki (1988). Jakiej cywilizacji Polacy potrzebują. Studia z dziejów idei i wyobraźni XIX wieku. Warszawa: PWN.

3. Liah Greenfeld (1992). Nationalism. Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge, Mass.-London, England: Harvard University Press.